Poetry in the time of Trump
Sherman Alexie sees bigotry, racism, loud-and-proud intolerance and a president who supports it all. And he isn’t having it. Alexie — a novelist, poet, memoirist and filmmaker — has responded to Charlottesville, Va. (and the week of headlines that came after) with a new poem, “Hymn.”
In a stream of rhyming couplets, he spits out a retribution of President Donald Trump and the president’s supporters:
Hey, Trump, I know you weren’t loved enough
By your sandpaper father, who roughed and roughed
And roughed the world. I have some empathy
For the boy you were. But, damn, your incivility,
Your volcanic hostility, your lists Of enemies, your moral apocalypse—
All of it makes you dumb and dangerous.
Next, he takes on the ugliness he sees from Trump’s supporters:
You’ve wounded our country. It might heal.
And yet, I think of what you’ve revealed
About the millions and millions of people
Who worship beneath your tarnished steeple.
Those folks admire your lack of compassion.
They think it’s honest and wonderfully old-fashioned.
Alexie — who is American Indian — softens his tone later in the poem, turning from Trump to address his readers.
“My friends, I’m not quite sure what I should do,” he says. “I’m as angry and afraid and disillusioned as you.”
He vows to help counteract the damage by trying to understand unfamiliar things and to love people who don’t look like him:
I am one more citizen marching
against hatred
Alone, we are defenseless. Collected, we are sacred.
Alexie isn’t the only one who has turned to poetry in the days since Charlottesville. At a candlelight vigil Wednesday night on the University of Virginia campus, a student read Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” a poem of strength in the face of hatred that contains these famous lines:
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
In a time when outrage is constant, protest poems are a given. For the Washington, D.C., March for Science last spring, Jane Hirshfield wrote a poem called “On the Fifth Day” about climate-change deniers:
On the fifth day the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers.
… Earlier this month on “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert presented a Trump-era rewrite
of Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” the poem on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your wealthy, your rich, your huddled MBAs yearning to be tax free …”
And just before Trump’s inauguration, Elisa Chavez — poet-in-residence for the Seattle Review of Books — wrote a poem called “Revenge” about how she plans to deal with the culture shift.
“Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war,” she writes. “I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism. …”
It’s simultaneously funny and devastating — and it reflects the way poetry can become a sharp weapon against the forces that want to Make America Great Again:
I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies.
With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars,
my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as f--and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,
because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming. You just delayed our coronation. alyson.ward@chron.com